As Bhayli goes into its third year in 2025, one thing is for certain. It needs to expand in order to increase sales, grow revenue, and compete in the market. As a social enterprise, Bhayli prioritizes its values and key goal of promoting sustainable livelihoods while trying to secure financial profit. However, the challenges of generating the income that Bhayli needs has made the team rethink its strategies and turn to new areas of growth. Ultimately, Bhayli needs to prioritize sustainability and think of long-term growth to fulfill its goals of women empowerment and climate action.
Key Challenges to Growth
Photo Credit: Tenzin Tsarong
Low Sales: Bhayli’s online shop features nine home decor items using two art forms. The first art form is our ‘Waste to Weave’ collection featuring products such as a bangle box, a hamper, a mirror frame, a photo frame, and a side table made from single-use plastic bottles. The second art form showcases our ‘Trash to Tile’ collection which transforms used aluminum cans into hand-embossed hosting trays. While, our hamper box for corporate gifting and our bangle box has seen some success, most of our other products just aren’t selling. Whether it is a lack of smaller, cheaper, more marketable items or customers not being aware of our products, low sales are detrimental to the success of Bhayli.
Inventory Management & Sales: The precarious dance that all businesses partake in is the careful and coordinated balance between increasing sales while managing inventory. Currently Bhayli maintains a relatively large inventory of its most sold items. While there are advantages to having a high inventory level such as mitigated risk of shortages and quicker response times to meet customer demands, there is a risk in the selling capacity of the product itself. The trick is finding the perfect equilibrium between inventory and sales which Bhayli is currently still figuring out.
Pricing Challenges: To tap into the export market which has been the long desired plan, Bhayli needs to rethink its pricing strategies. Merchant exporters typically buy in bulk allowing them to negotiate lower costs while also benefiting from a reduced GST rate. Currently, the price of each individual item in Bhayli’s online shop takes into account the pay for our creative partners, labor costs for our carpenter, logistics, and an additional 30% increment price. However, if Bhayli does collaborate with exporters to sell its products internationally, new pricing structures need to be put in place for the export market. This puts us in a moral dilemma where on the one hand Bhayli’s expansion is critical, which on the other we need to ensure fair wages for the rural women with whom we collaborate.
New Strategies
Photo Credit: Tenzin Tsarong
Product Developments: To increase sales and venture into more profitable markets, Bhayli is in the process of designing two new products — a wall key holder and a jewelry box/key box. The wall key holder is the result of an effort to design a smaller home decor product that would be cheaper and more marketable than the other high segment items that Bhayli sells in its online shop. Another reason to launch this new product is a potential collaboration to conduct a workshop. The workshop would allow for a creative space where the Bhayli team can demonstrate the embossment of aluminum can tiles which would then be fitted into the key holder. This venture could prove successful in the long run and give us the opportunity to expand further with art studios. The key box on the other hand is a new product that could prove profitable with hotels and restaurants. The key box also serves another purpose as a jewelry box for more dainty, thinner pieces of jewelry, catering to more of a western audience.
Photo Credit: Tenzin Tsarong
New Creative Partner Hires: The Bhayli team wants to increase the number of creative partners that we work with and help empower more rural women to set their own income goals. There is also a need to hire more creative partners at this stage in order to fulfill work orders. This is a prime time to set guidelines in place for future hires regarding work benefits and advancements and making clear rules and regulations about work expectations. To get on board with the hiring process of our future creative partners, the team has scoped out the village of Devipura where the AIF Fellow conducted surveys with 92 women. Within that sample size, the Bhayli team will take on 10 women as creative partners in the first round and then proceed accordingly to hire more of the women in the near future.
Photo Credit: JustKraft
Innovation with Machinery: While spending an evening dinner with three of our creative partners at their home, I finally got a personal demonstration on the ‘trash to tile’ process. This process took 20 minutes to finish, even for our creative partner who had been doing this for a year. The average, un-trained person could well take half an hour! I realized then a need to speed up the process of this very labor intensive work, not only to save time and effort, but also to cut cost for the tile itself. The conclusion was that an industrial machine to produce the design on the aluminum tile was neither practical nor in our budget. This called for a unique and budget-friendly solution that was accessible for all our creative partners. Currently the Bhayli team is determining ways to cut time on this process by exploring a 3D printed folder option with a rolling pin to put pressure on the aluminum tile. We are hoping for a successful result!
